“Excellent,” the voice said, now coming not through headphones but from everywhere. “Welcome to the Open Access Altus Space. We will now give you your body. If anything goes wrong, please say the word ‘Exit.’ ”

In a blink, I had arms and legs again. And I was completely nude.

“Congratulations on joining the next step in human history with Altus,” Alta said. There was nothing here but my body standing on a gray floor that extended forever in every direction. The sky or ceiling or whatever was white and infinite. “In this space, you can come and think. You can rest here instead of sleeping, and you will wake up feeling completely refreshed. But there is also nothing to do. That is because you have not created or purchased any objects to exist in your Altus Space. At Altus, we have created a few objects for you.” A desk appeared, and then a chair. “But we need you to create more objects. To do that, you can use these tools.” Suddenly a menu appeared, as if I were inside of a graphics-editing program.

“You can use these tools to build things, as simple as a shiny ball, as complicated as a pet. You are now an Altus developer. When you are done with your object, you may, if you wish, list it for sale in the Altus Space Store. You can earn AltaCoin by selling your creations. You can also convert other currencies into AltaCoin at AltaExchange.com. AltaCoin is a cryptocurrency that is, at the moment, only mined by us at Altus, so there is a limited amount. We will be opening mining to the public shortly.”

As Alta said these things, images appeared in my Altus Space, showing me how easy it would be to convert my money into AltaCoin.

“Right now, we are letting fifty people per week into the Premium Altus Space, and we’re choosing those people based on who has earned the most AltaCoin. When I say ‘earned,’ I mean it. While all AltaCoin can be used to purchase items for your Altus Space, only AltaCoin earned by selling your creations will be counted toward your total for access to the Premium Altus Space.”

There was no explanation of what made the Premium Space better than the Open Access Space, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t want in. I opened the Altus Space Store, which had been shown to me in that introductory tutorial, and saw what the most popular products were. Shirts and pants topped the list. The first non-clothing item, I was surprised to find, was carpet. I guess that made sense now that I thought about it. It would be easy to make, and the infinite plane of gray would probably get old pretty fast. There were a number of household items, from beds to lamps. And also high on the list were a few very simple rooms. A good room would be hard to make—wall textures, molding, ceilings.

I had no interest in buying any of these things. I needed to make AltaCoin, not spend it, so I had to create something, something popular that would also be simple. It occurred to me that people, with their carpets and walls and ceilings and lamps, were all solving the same problem in the same way. The problem was a big, boring, overly bright, somewhat grating world. But I was pretty sure there was another, faster way to solve it.

I couldn’t be the first person to think of this, but as I scrolled through the store, I couldn’t find anyone who had done it.

I closed the store with a swipe of my hand and opened the Altus Editor. It was built roughly like any other 3-D design engine, and I’d used plenty of those before. I started out with a vector of a tall, thin triangle about the length and width of my forearm. I programmed its stiffness to be just enough to hold its own weight; then I brushed it with a soft green color along the edges, and a slightly yellower green down the middle.

Then I cloned that shape a few dozen times and made slight modifications, widening some, curving others.

Then I arranged them randomly, cloned them a bunch of times, and shrank the whole thing down to a one-foot-by-one-foot patch and lowered it to the ground. A beautiful, perfect, natural-looking square of grass.

The Altus engine didn’t seem to have a way for me to expand this texture across a wide range, so instead I cloned and cloned and cloned. My patch of grass expanded exponentially until it was nearly a mile on a side.

I wasn’t done, though. To finish, I created a one-meter-wide hollow sphere and painted its interior a nearly uniform blue, using a lighter blue around its circumference. I streaked it with white, marked its luminosity at 30 percent maximum, and then changed its diameter to ten miles. I was no longer in an infinite plane. I was standing outside on a beautiful spring day.

Honestly, it was rough, but it had only been maybe an hour of work. I went back to the Altus Space Store and saw that I was too late. Another creator had indeed already listed an object called Outside, complete with grass and a sky. It was listed at 10 AltaCoin and was already in the top-fifty most popular items. Fuck.

You could preview an object. So, even though I didn’t have any AltaCoin yet, I could still try out “Outside” for myself for a thirty-second trial. I did and was even more frustrated. The sky was a uniform blue sphere, the grass blades a flat green and had no weight of their own. I knew that mine was better, but it wasn’t better enough to climb the ranks.

I kicked at my grass, which I was shocked to find actually interacted with my naked foot.

That gave me an idea.

I created a solid cube ten miles on a side, which meant, immediately, I was inside it. So, first step, I made it 100 percent transparent so I could see the landscape instead of the uniform gray of being stuck inside a solid cube. I opened up the property called viscosity and began to move it up. As I did, my arm had to work harder and harder to move. I was pushing against the interior of the cube!

I pulled the viscosity down until I could just barely feel its force as I moved my arm through the cube’s interior.

Then I set some animation key frames on the cube. I set it to move one mile over the course of five hours, then move back to its original position over another five hours. Then I set it to continue that loop forever.

I hovered my hand over the OK button for just a second before I slapped it. Suddenly, beautifully, a gentle breeze began to blow over my, yes, still entirely naked body.

I looked down, and the fucking grass was rustling in the wind.

Fuck yes. OK, this place was amazing. This whole thing was amazing! And this was the Open Access? What was Premium like?!

I titled my object Breezy Spring Day 1.0 and listed it for sale for 5 AltaCoin, the equivalent of, at that point, around $2.50.

São Paulo Climate Talks Deteriorate as Scandal Widens

Associated Press

After the scandal initially brought to light by an anonymous online news organization, The Thread, the United Nations has officially brought the São Paulo climate talks to an end without resolution. The talks were scheduled to go on for another four days, but after several sources confirmed the truth of the allegations, representatives are returning to their respective nations.

A number of classified documents and emails were leaked in the midst of the talks, showing that US and EU representatives were receiving gifts, including lavish hotel rooms, from the Chinese solar power industry. The scandal quickly overshadowed the summit.

“We think it’s best to move this down the road so that we can take a close look at what’s happened before moving forward,” said Senator Corey Knudsen, head of the US congressional delegation.

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